JRF anti-poverty strategy: We can solve poverty in the UK

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation launched its anti-poverty strategy, ‘We can solve poverty in the UK’, in September 2016. It is a long-term strategy to solve poverty in the UK which aligns greater corporate responsibility with an active, enabling state, promoting individual capacity and capability. The report makes clear the many links between poverty and protected characteristics, most notably the disproportionate way poverty affects women, BME and disabled people, and single parents.

The strategy has five key areas of suggestions:

Boost incomes and reduce costs;

Deliver an effective benefit system;

Improve education standards and raise skills;

Strengthen families and communities; and

Promote long-term economic growth benefiting everyone.

The vision of the strategy is that by 2030 (when children starting school in 2016 will be reaching adulthood), Britain will be a place where:

No one is ever destitute;

Less than one in ten of the population are in poverty at any one time; and